I am a boy again, and am thrilled with such a feeling as a poet has when he treads visionary worlds and forgets his sad reality. How happy I feel as I move along in the white moonlight from wharf to wharf, gazing on each wooden ship and wondering on their past voyages, what seas they crossed ere I was born, and what the seaports looked like when they came sailing down, with weather-beaten sailors staring from the fo’c’sle head.
How distinctly I remember it all! I cannot move from one ship’s side: the figure-head is that of some beautiful goddess with a crown of bronzed hair, wherein a dove flutters. Her face represents, exactly, my romantic ideal of all the tender beauty of woman as I dreamed of it in my early boyhood. It is a beautiful face. I gaze from the wharf at it with fascinated eyes: all is silent except for the plomp of the waters against the ship’s side as the tide ebbs. Still I gaze at her praying hands, as with wide-opened eyelids she stares across the moonlit quay at the sleeping city.
I went back to my room and dreamed of that perfect face. So strangely was I impressed by its beauty that I felt a longing to find some living type resembling it. The next day I walked up the Sydney streets and earnestly scanned the faces of the Colonial girls. None of them seemed to me as beautiful as the thought of the artist who had fashioned the perfect outlines of my figure-head. The next night I went down to the quay and gazed once more at her, and then again the following night; but when I arrived on the wharf to my great sorrow I found her gone. She had left her beauty in my soul, and though she was only an insensate figure-head, the memory of her features and expression stirred and fired some devotional dream within me, and gave me a poetic reverence for womanhood, a gift from out the great strangeness of things, that I have ever cherished. Often in seaports, on my travels from land to land, my comrades wondered why I stood a moment and gazed at the silent sailing ships by the wharf. But, though I searched, I never saw that figure-head again. I suppose they have broken those old wooden ships up now and burnt them on the hearth fires of the cities, and by them other boys have probably dreamed of strange lands, and lovers gazed in the curling flames with shining eyes. Ah! little did they dream what their log of firewood had meant to me; and while they kissed with clinging lips the substance of my boyhood dreams, those features that lived spiritually in my imagination fell to ash as the flames faded in the homestead hearth fire.
The poetry of Sydney harbour, with its sights and turmoil of sound, lives in my memory as though to-day is far-off yesterday. I even remember, and feel again, my strange romantic loneliness as I watch the silent ships lying out in the bay. Night, like life, is on the deep, tide-moving waters; in the dark depths the fixed mirrored stars shine steadfastly like Eternity, while over them the waters ebb seaward or flow towards the shore. The outline of North Shore, like another continent, rises across the wide harbour, and exactly opposite are the spires of the grand, silent, sea-board city. Some drunken sailor’s song floats across the bay from the wind-jammer that is lying at anchor out in the stream. Several lights are twinkling across by Miller’s Point. The Orient liner, the giant aristocrat of the quay, is agleam with shining port-holes; her funnels belch forth smoke that ascends to the silence. We creep by—three homeless men and a boy—looking for a place to sleep! Our shadows suddenly hurry on with us, as in the moon’s gleam we spy the quartermaster on watch at the gangway. No hope there for us, we think, so we go round to the anchored ferry-boats and leave the great liner behind. She’s off for England to-morrow, dear old England! O magical word to how many exiles in the sleeping city, and especially to us, with our stomachs rumbling with emptiness. The big Manly Beach ferry-boat is moored by the wharf; our frightened eyes look carefully around, then down on board we go to seek the cushioned settees of the saloon. We slept there last night. Again we creep into the saloon, four of us: Roberts, the ship’s stoker, villainous-looking, old, with unshaved face; Ross, the son of the Right Honourable, and the third man, who is a late schoolmaster from a school of great distinction. He is a pessimistic-looking chap, perhaps because he lent Ross his last ten shillings on the promise of five hundred per cent. interest when Ross got an expected cheque from England. “Ah, woeful when!” The night is getting old and cold; how comfortably the warmth of the dim saloon strikes us as we four derelicts creep across. The moonlight is streaming through the port-holes. Ross smothers a note of irresistible exultation, for he has spotted a large bunch of bananas on the saloon table! Such sudden unexpected affluence is too much for me, and even as I wonder why the saloon smells so strongly of fresh tobacco smoke, I sit down plomp! on the stomach of the ferry-boat’s night watchman, who is asleep on the settee!
Kawieri, N.Z.
A terrible yell of pain escapes the official’s lips; like four shadows in one headlong leap we cross the saloon and rush up the gangway. How we scampered across the quay space and then rescued poor old Roberts, the stoker, as he puffed behind and stumbled on the kerb-side and fell with a crash! Under the trees in the domain he sat swearing terrifically, but calmed down as we held his blood-splashed face up and examined it by moonlight. The schoolmaster lent his handkerchief of other days to stanch the blood-flow. Ross promised another fifteen shillings when the cheque came. Then, under the big-leafed tree, with our heads pillowed on our coats or caps, we lay with our faces side by side to sleep. I can still see the many huddled derelicts under the gum-trees of Sydney’s Hyde Park, disreputable old men, and young men, good and bad. I watch by my chums on our big bedroom floor and hear the far cry of the wild animals in the Botanical Gardens Zoo, and smell the dew-damp leaves and domain grass, as dawn steals over the windless trees away back beyond the horizon of more years than I like to count.
Some inexplicable kind of sadness comes over me as I look back to the lost splendour of my derelict days. How wealthy I was with all my youthful unfulfilled promises, and what security I found in the hopeful, manly eyes of men who went down to the sea in ships. How I stuck to them as they yarned together, or sang till the shore cave echoed. The shanty was a paradise, filled with men of mighty deeds, as I gazed with the eyes of boyish inexperience at the stalwart, unshaved men from ’Frisco and London, and listened to the stories of sad self-sacrifice, or great deeds on land and sea, performed in the valiant imagination of those wonderful brains of the world’s worst men.
I often wonder what I have missed through the inherited taint of vagabondage that is in my blood. Should I have been happier and gained some wealth had I gone ashore in some far country, scorning vagabonds and marching down the track on honest feet, like some Dick Whittington, looking for the lights of some distant city, with my violin slung beside me? I doubt it. If one is really honest, one is sure, some day, to trust the wrong man through not being dishonest oneself. But to go back to my reminiscences at the moment when I arrived in Sydney from Samoa.
I did not stay in Sydney very long. I had three or four pounds in my pocket and did not want to get stranded, so once more I looked around and was lucky enough to secure a berth on a steamer that was going to New Zealand for a cargo of meat, and from there to London. I got a job down in the engine-room as a kind of snowman to look after the refrigerators. The chief engineer was a terrible pig; he was a Dutchman, and gave me no peace, but made me paint the lower-deck iron roof. We eventually had a fight, and I received a black eye which took a considerable time to cure itself. I made up my mind to leave at the first opportunity.